Hardships in West Coast Educational Institutions

For those who wished to pursue higher education, there were many instances where Italian Americans were shown to experience both aid and hardship with assimilating through higher educational institutions. First looking into their difficulties, we can see that similar to the east coast, Italian Americans struggled with their social status and identity. It was previously mentioned that Italians were “white on arrival”. Italian Americans in the west still carried on their previously adopted “white on arrival”, however in addition to this, they were also subjected to the pedagogy of whiteness. The pedagogy of whiteness in this context refers to the white citizens on the west coast, or specifically the bay area in california, teaching the ideas based on white culture and behavior to the Italians. The enforcement of these teachings caused many problems because white citizens hated the Italians who didn’t assimilate into white culture, while the ones who were taking on these white views of people and aspects of life were hated by the other minority groups they started to discriminate against after behaving according to their whiteness. These same effects carried on in school environments as certain Italian American students weren’t able to fit in with certain groups of white students and were hated against by the other groups if they carried negative white views towards them. Italians in New York and Massachusetts to name a few places preferred being homeschooled to avoid these conflicts however that was not a very popular alternative in the west. But because of the fact that there aren’t many widespread or well known documented experiences of discrimination similar to John Fante’s stories, it could be said that this feeling of exclusion and discrimination was less frequent and potentially less intense.